The invention relates, in general, to image sensors with pixel reset.
Image sensors find applications in a wide variety of fields, including machine vision, robotics, guidance and navigation, automotive applications, and consumer products. In many smart image sensors, it is desirable to integrate on-chip circuitry to control the image sensor and to perform signal and image processing on the output image.
Active pixel sensors (APS), which have one or more active transistors within the pixel unit cell, can be made compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies and promise high readout rates compared to passive pixel sensors. Active pixel sensors often are arranged as arrays of elements, which can be read out, for example, a column at a time. Each column can be read out at one time, driven and buffered for sensing by a readout circuit.
A dominant source of noise for some sensors is thermal noise in the channel of the pixel's reset transistor. Such thermal noise is often referred to as kTC noise. Noise less than kTC noise can be achieved with photodiode-type pixels using soft-reset techniques. Soft, or sub-threshold, reset refers to resetting the pixel with both the drain and gate of the reset transistor maintained at substantially the same potential so that the sense node is reset using sub-threshold MOSFET current. Sub-threshold resetting of photodiode active pixel sensors, however, tends to result in higher image lag and low-light level non-linearity.